Mayberry: Wrapping up some loose' ends

First, a correction: Remember Dino A. P. McCurdy, the 16-year-old who walked off a tramp steamer in 1926, made a life for himself in America, became a cardiologist and paid back his adoptive country for the next 80 some years?

I said he died at 103. Actually, he was 102. My apologies to the family. My error takes nothing away from his remarkable story.

Justice in Florida: Remember Marissa Alexander, the black woman who either was defending herself or took an angry potshot at her abusive husband but missed and no one was hurt?

Marissa’s jury deliberated for exactly 12 minutes and found her guilty of committing a felony with a gun. The jurors pointedly were not told that a guilty verdict would result in a mandatory 20-year prison sentence.

On Sept. 26, a Florida appeals court unanimously overturned the verdict and sentence, finding that the judge erroneously instructed the jury that, to be found not guilty, Alexander had to prove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.

In the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case, Florida law was depicted as exactly the opposite: The prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self-defense.

Racism and Halloween jokes: Nearly 3,500 black Americans and 1,300 white Americans were lynched by lawless mobs, mostly by hanging, between 1882 and 1968. While I was going to college, people were still being lynched!

There are thousands of people alive today who witnessed or lost loved ones to these abominations.

Even now, victims of workplace racial discrimination are often taunted with miniature nooses reminding them that white supremacists used to hang “uppity” black folk for doing things like voting or getting an education.

George Vucelich’s hanging of a skeleton wearing an Obama-Biden T-shirt in Springfield is perceived by some (including me) as hate speech — either an incredibly insensitive reference to those shameful acts or a shocking call to action to crazies to do the same to the president and vice president of the United States. Given our poisonous political climate, it is the farthest thing from funny.

Here’s something we missed during the government shutdown. Remember the fertilizer plant explosion in West Texas, last April that killed 14 people, nine of them first responders, and leveled 50 homes?

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has imposed the maximum amount of fines, $118,300, against the factory owners for 24 violations.

Let’s see, that works out to $13,450 per victim and wouldn’t cover the loss of one home. And some of you think there’s too much government regulation. Seems like there should have been a lot more regulation pre-explosion.

But that’s Texas for you. Hey, come on down to Texas where the “business climate is great because we don’t regulate.”

Critics have raised legitimate concerns about the K-12 use of iPads in the Ridley schools, such as the demise of memorization, cursive handwriting and the joyous habit of reading.

A friend of mine worries that librarians would be relegated to the task of “pushing carts full of iPads through the halls,” and that students will plagiarize Wikipedia instead of researching primary sources.

The Ridley School District is well aware of all of these concerns and also of the potential for abuses such as sexting and cyber bullying.

The iPads promise to be fantastic new teaching tools. Ridley is teaching students to use them responsibly in conjunction with other teaching materials. We’ll see how it does.

After losing a stellar teacher to gun violence this week, I’m much more worried about guns than iPad abuse. By the way, Slate reports 24,580 Americans have died from gun violence since Sandy Hook last Dec. 14. We still have time to reach our annual average of 32,000.

With regard to computers and mobile devices, I would like to add a worry of my own, the loss of basic language skills.

To online posters, texters and emailers everywhere: Plurals do not come with apostrophes, only possessives do. “The Smiths are fine people but the Smiths’ children are brats.”

You can’t “loose” an election or a wallet. “Loose” means not tight. “Lose” means misplace or not win.

Don’t believe autocorrect: “There” means in that place, “their” means belonging to them and “they’re’ means “they are.” Autocorrect seems not to discern the difference.

And for God’s sake, if you have to name call, it’s spelled “moron,” not “moran.”

Jodine Mayberry is a longtime journalist. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@comcast.net. Read her blog, This Week in Reality, at dtweekreality.blogspot.com.